


Mostly

by TroubleIWant



Series: Wolf!Derek [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-21
Updated: 2014-09-21
Packaged: 2018-02-18 07:50:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2340737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TroubleIWant/pseuds/TroubleIWant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an alternate follow-up to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/2336294">In Your Eyes I see Somebody I Used to Know</a>, and will not make much sense without reading that first!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mostly

*

Derek’s head isn’t working right. He’s hungry and tired and everything feels muzzy, like he took a nap in the middle of the afternoon and woke up in the half-light of early morning. Disoriented. The man who found him, Benny or something, keeps fluttering around nervously asking what he’s doing in “the sanctuary” and what happened to the wolf, and fuck if Derek knows. He’s too messed up to play nice or lie well, and the guy probably thinks he’s a psychopath. Or maybe a head case. They let him stay in the cabin nearby until they decide what to do with him.

*

Stiles is on the phone, and he’s coming for Derek. This will all make sense. It will only be a few hours and everything will be right again.

*

Only Stiles isn’t coming. It’s been more than a full day and Derek is still waiting. Derek’s going to give him hell for this, he’s sick of this strange nurse’s cabin, the thin cot they’ve got him sleeping on. He wants his own clothes, sheets that smell like Stiles rather than antiseptic and other wolves. A sense memory of pushing his muzzle into Stiles’ cheek keeps distracting him; he can’t remember when he would have done that. He dreams in black and white, without words.

*

“Hello there,” the scholarly man who runs the place says carefully, letting himself into Derek’s makeshift room. Derek blinks up at him in annoyance. Not Stiles. “Now that you’re getting your wits about you, I need to ask…you seem to know Mr. Stilinski-Hale, yes?”

“Yes,” Derek answers laconically.

“Right.” Benny shifts uncomfortably. “You might know that he dropped off a wolf here, months ago. A big, black one? Only it’s disappeared from our sanctuary. Since he’s coming we should really try to have answers. Wolves don’t just disappear. Do you know anything about it?” There’s not much hope in his expression. It seems like he doesn’t think Derek would be capable of disappearing a wolf.

The wolf must be him, but…months? Derek has a half memory of raw meat in his jaws, licking the juices off the kitchen floor. Only that can’t be a memory; he never fully shifts around the house. Only a day ago he was in the preserve, snarling at some crazy witch in their territory. And then here. It hasn’t been months.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he says.

Benny sighs. “Well, if you’d like something to read,” he says, offering a rolled up paper.

Derek takes it, skims the headlines. Doubletakes. “2023?”

“Yes,” Benny confirms, looking like he’s worried whatever Derek’s got might be catching.

Derek starts to grasp now that he’s not just battling a magic-hangover from hell, that he’s been unhooked from his familiar world. There’s things Stiles wasn’t telling him. Somehow he stumbled out of the flow of time, and now he’s being tossed head over heels by the currents as he’s wading back in.

*

Benny says his ride is here and Derek sways to his feet. Finally. He can already feel Stiles’ arms around him, grounding him. But it’s only Scott.

His Alpha looks upset and happy in equal degree, which is maybe fair if they’ve really thought Derek was gone for over a year. But Derek’s still tired and he’s been waiting, and Scott’s just not the person he wanted to see.

“Derek! man, it’s really you,” Scott says with wonder in his tone, and something else at the edges. “He really did it.”

“Stiles said he was coming to get me himself,” Derek says petulantly. Every time. “I’ve been literally waiting days. Where’s Stiles?”

Scott smiles, or tries. It’s a sort of awful expression, strained and wincing. “Stiles is--” he stops, looks at the floor, clenches his jaw. “He was always a bit of a reckless driver.”

Was.

Derek doesn’t get it then, not really. He doesn’t fully get it until thirty minutes more of stilted explanations and shouting and phone calls to calm authorities who say ‘yes, sir, we’re very sorry, but yes.’ In that one word, though, is the first cold, knife-sharp stab of realization. Stiles was, past tense.

He wonders, later. What if he’d figured it out sooner? If he’d realized what Stiles had been going through before that phone call, if he had understood that it had been a whole year.

He replays the conversation in his head. He’d been angry, snappish. Had he even said “I love you”? What would have happened if he’d been comforting, if he’d said it was fine? Stiles should sleep first and come get him later? If he’d only been less demanding…

He sits in their bathtub, water gone lukewarm. Stiles replaced the shower head and the new spray pattern feels wrong. It was only yesterday that he was living here with Stiles, but it also wasn’t, and so many little things are different. New scented soap, old towels thrown out. he’s always finding something. The crack near the kitchen door wider. The leaky hose out back replaced. The house is choking with mementos of their last year, the one that they didn’t get to share. Each time he finds one it feels like Stiles’ ghost.

He could dip his head under water and just stop. He feels strong enough, or weak enough maybe, to take in lungfuls of water and never sputter to the surface. Derek’s not really one to believe in any afterlife, but who knows? It certainly wouldn’t be worse than this.

He can’t, though. Scott told him what Stiles did, about the price for getting him back. A life for a life for a life. There’s already been too much death.

So Derek lives.

Mostly.

 


End file.
